After a hellish month due to my baby’s breathing issues, I
finally received a new embryo transfer date, for late February. Though the health drama had been giving me second thoughts about moving forward, once I saw the treatment calendar, I was all in again.
I giddily
booked my travel arrangements and scheduled my ultrasounds. I refilled my
prescriptions. I calculated the due date and corresponding astrological sign of
the potential baby-to-be. I brainstormed new names. I attached to the idea of her. I let myself feel hopeful
again.
Then I received another email from my treatment coordinator. She’d
forgotten that I wasn’t on birth control. (Of course I wasn’t…because she told
me to stop all medications in December!) The embryo transfer date was null and
void. I would have to wait for my next period and reschedule. Again.
I lost it. I went full Karen on the clinic manager. (Again.)
I threatened to pull out of the contract, demand my refund, and pursue
treatment elsewhere. Of course, I didn’t want to do that, because it wouldn’t
get me pregnant any faster.
A nurse called to talk me off the ledge.
“There’s still a chance you could keep the transfer date,”
she said. “When was your last period?”
“December 26,” I told her. And that one, as far as I could
tell, only happened because I stopped all the fertility meds when my previous
transfer was canceled.
“Are your periods regular?”
“They haven’t been,” I said. I explained about my missing period in the fall and the Provera I had to take to get it back. There had been
nothing “regular” about my cycles since…oh…2019, before I got on the infertility
treatment roller coaster.
“We need to figure out if you’re growing follicles,” she
said. “Because if you are, your body might be releasing hormones that could
interfere with the medication protocol.”
I didn’t know the details of my follicular count, but I knew
that in the past, it had been puny. The nurse reviewed my last baseline
ultrasound and my SIS and confirmed there wasn’t much happening in the follicle
department – but was that because I had been on birth control? Or because I was old?
“One advantage of being a seasoned woman,” she said (and,
yes, that was the term she used), “is that we don’t grow many follicles. So I
think we should do an ultrasound, see what’s going on in there, and if it’s not
much, then we could potentially go straight to Lupron and stay on track for
late February. What do you want to do?”
It was a risk, diverging from the tried-and-true protocol
that had worked when I got pregnant with a donor embryo the first time, but at
this point, I was feeling desperate. I had re-entered West Coast IVF’s program back
in August and I still hadn’t had a transfer. I didn’t want to wait anymore. I
wasn’t sure I could.
“Let’s try,” I said.
And so, the following Monday, I trekked to Dr. Baby-Maker’s
clinic, where I once again submitted myself to another baseline ultrasound. As the
sonographer readied the machine, she asked about my infertility journey so
far. I told her all about the tooth ordeal and the canceled transfer in December. The
tone of her voice indicated she truly felt sorry for me. Pity was nice, I
guess, but what I needed more were answers.
The sonographer quickly found three small follicles (nothing to write home about) on the
left ovary. As for the right? It was playing hide-and-seek. The sonographer
maneuvered the wand in a thousand uncomfortable positions and she simply could
not find it.
“I think it’s right behind this bowel activity,” she said,
indicating what looked like a pulsing tube on the screen. Basically, I think she
was saying that I was full of shit. (‘Cause that’s not mortifying.)
She dug around a little while longer, then (I think) gave
up, grabbed a screenshot of something oval-esque, and called it an ovary for
the report’s sake.
“I’ll send this off to California right away,” she said.
“Hopefully you can get going already.”
I had my doubts, but later that day, I received confirmation
from the doctor that I could start Lupron and keep the February transfer date. Hooray!
My treatment coordinator soon called to make sure my
concerns had been addressed. Since she asked, I told her that there was one other
unresolved issue: I felt uncomfortable with our backup embryo option, the one
that included an egg donor who had a relative with schizophrenia and an unclear
family history of mental retardation. I wanted to see more profiles –
specifically those with proven fertility.
To make things easier, I told her I was open to any race. It
was something I’d been thinking a lot about over the past several weeks. White
couples adopted BIPOC children all the time; why would this be any different?
It would be challenging, of course, and my husband and I would have to educate
ourselves and immerse our child in her culture, but we were willing and eager
to do so if it meant a healthier baby.
Within hours, I had a new backup profile in my inbox.
This profile had already been successful for another West
Coast IVF patient. Unfortunately, that was about all that it had going for it.
The egg donor’s family has a history of obesity. The sperm donor’s family had a
history of high blood pressure, stroke, pneumonia, melanoma and breast cancer.
I didn’t hesitate to turn that one down. There had to be
better options. And since I’d complained, the clinic seemed more willing to
offer them to me.
The next backup profile arrived – and I fell in love with it.
The egg donor was athletic, articulate, and creative. Her
favorite movie: The Princess Bride. Favorite book: The Great Gatsby. Favorite
season: spring. And her health history was impeccable. The sperm donor was fit, entrepreneurial, and
clearly had a sense of humor (“Love dogs, think fish are hilarious, cats are
demon creatures”). His personality absolutely burst off the page. His family health history wasn’t flawless, but there weren’t
any concerning patterns.
I looked up the sperm donor’s ID on the Facebook group for
the sperm bank. Picture after picture of babies made from his genetic material came up.
The sperm donor’s genes were clearly the dominant ones in all of his offspring – but his genes and my family's looked nothing alike. The kids were adorable, but it
would be obvious to everyone that this baby wasn't “ours.”
I was concerned about how this baby would handle
questions about her origins. I thought of a line from the children’s book we have about
donor conception that goes, “To make a baby, you need a seed
from a man, an egg from a woman, and a nice warm tummy to grow the baby in.” I
imagined our future child stuck having many interactions like this:
Random Person: Are you adopted?
Future Child: No, I’m donor-conceived.
Random Person: What’s that?
Future Child: To make a baby, you need a seed from a man, an
egg from a woman, and a nice warm tummy to grow the baby in…
It seemed unfair to subject a child to incessant
questioning, not to mention racism. And yet, I could feel the good vibes from
this profile. It also had one current pregnancy, a better track record than our
chosen profile, which had a negative pregnancy test and a
chemical pregnancy to its name.
I had to ask myself: Did I want the fantasy of a baby (who
might look like my husband and me) or did I want a flesh-and-blood baby (who
would definitely not look like either of us)? I could clearly imagine myself
with the baby from our chosen profile; I wasn’t sure I could see myself with the
new one. (Though I know I would love any baby put into my arms.)
The clock was ticking. My coordinator needed a yes or a no.
And she needed to know which profile was primary. If I chose the new one to be
my primary, I would have to give the old one up (because the new one had
multiple female embryos available, so I wouldn’t need a backup).
My husband was firmly on the side of the new profile, his
reasoning being: if we’re going to do this, we want it to work. My younger teen
agreed. My older teen and I were waffling. We didn’t want to let go of the old
profile. But what if the transfer with the old profile failed? I’d be kicking
myself for months over wasting all this time and money.
I wished for the impossible (of course I did): that we could transfer one of each and let fate decide, but I was pretty sure the clinic wouldn't allow that, and I didn't want to risk twins. (Imagine explaining twins genetically unrelated to us and one another!)
Ultimately, I let myself be persuaded by reason. The new profile had the best
chance of success, so that was the one I was going to choose.
But on the morning I was supposed to send back the
confirmation form, my printer refused to print. I tried once, twice, three
times. There was still ink in the cartridge, but the text wasn’t printing
clearly. I signed up for a free trial of Adobe and tried to e-sign it, but the
document wouldn’t let me edit a section of the document where I needed to print
my name. “Is this a sign?” I asked aloud to no one in particular.
If it was a sign, I ignored it. I ordered a new ink
cartridge, got it installed, printed off the confirmation page, and signed it
along with my husband before the day was done.
“We’re sure about this, right?” I asked him.
“I’m done discussing this,” he said. (All this deliberation had begun to sour him on the whole endeavor. Topic for a future post...)
I emailed the signed confirmation form to my
coordinator. So that was that; we were letting go of the old profile and would
be transferring a female embryo from the new profile in late February.
Only a few minutes after sending the confirmation, my
treatment coordinator responded, confused. Did we want the new profile as the
primary? Or as the backup?
I stared at the message for a long time, unsure how to
respond. It felt like all day, the signs were saying, “Don’t let go of the
profile you love.” Now she was giving me another chance to change my mind.
Should I take it?
I typed up my email response, with two lines: “Primary” and
“Backup.” I copied and pasted the profile numbers – the old one for primary, the
new one for backup. Then I swapped them. But I couldn’t press “send.”
I tried to imagine how I would feel months from now,
pregnant or not, if I let the old profile go. Even worse: what if someone else
got pregnant with that embryo? What if I saw a picture of that baby in the West
Coast IVF Facebook group? Would I feel like she should have been “mine,” just
like I did with my baby’s only full genetic sibling who was growing up halfway
across the country? (I would give anything to have had another embryo from her profile available. Then there would have been zero deliberation; only celebration.)
Something in me again said, “Try.” I had to give the embryo
I wanted most a chance. If the transfer was unsuccessful, the new profile would
still have an embryo ready and waiting. (Though the age gap between my baby and
her little-sister-to-be would be close to two years at that point.)
I told my coordinator to keep the old profile as the primary
and the new profile as a backup. And then I told myself to stop deliberating. (‘Cause
that works.)
This process revealed traits in me I didn’t recognize – and didn’t
like. I used to be so decisive and now I seemed so wishy-washy. Also: why, after
I pushed and pushed to get what I wanted (in this case, a backup profile worthy
of being a primary profile), did I reject it once I got it?
And, most pressing: now that preparation for the next
transfer was underway, why did I suddenly feel so ambivalent about moving forward at
all, with any profile?